brilliant, are not sufficiently suggestive of the extraordinary
influence which that most celebrated of writers exercised. It was in
no uncritical spirit that Mr. Morley wrote: "The existence, character,
and career of this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a
new and prodigious era. The peculiarities of his individual genius
changed the mind and spiritual conformation of France, and in a less
degree of the whole of the West, with as far-spreading and invincible
an effect as if the work had been wholly done, as it was actually
aided, by the sweep of deep-lying collective forces. A new type of
belief, and of its shadow, disbelief, was stamped by the impression of
his character and work into the intelligence and feeling of his own
and modern times." Nor will Villemain be accused of rapt enthusiasm
when he writes, "C'est le plus puissant renovateur des esprits depuis
Luther, et l'homme qui a mis le plus en commun les idées de l'Europe
par sa gloire, sa longue vie, son merveilleux esprit et son
universelle clarté." The strangest fact to contemplate with regard to
this unrivaled popularity, this astonishing range of influence, is
that it truly constitutes an apotheosis of superficiality. And this in
no disparaging spirit of Carlylese disdain for clear ideas around
which hang no mists of oracular obscurity, but rather by way of
tribute to a heart that beat responsively to human suffering, to a
mind keenly sensible of human wrongs. Voltaire rejected the subtleties
of metaphysical thought, was indeed incapable of attaining to the
heights of speculative contemplation; he was only preternaturally
sensitive to the moral defects of this imperfect world, and determined
to bend all his efforts to the alleviation of injustice and of crime.
As a further concession to his superficiality as a thinker we may
frankly admit his incapacity to originate new ideas. His mind indeed
was extraordinarily receptive, his intellectual curiosity unlimited,
and hostile critics have availed themselves of this very receptivity
as a medium of attack upon his originality. They are free to pursue
him on that score, but it does not appreciably detract from his
greatness in the eyes of posterity to recognize that Bayle before him
had preached the doctrine of toleration; that Montesquieu had
advocated the abolition of torture and of slavery, and the sanctity of
social institutions, or that Boileau forsooth had upheld the dignity
of classical formulas in matters literary. It is rather in the
mobility of his mind and in the impressionability of his temperament
that we should seek for an explanation of a philosophical disturbance
in his ideas. It is not an actual mental confusion that I refer to,
for his diction is never more limpid than in the expression of his
easy personal beliefs; but a certain intellectual inconsistency in his
habits of thought makes it impossible for us to hold him down to any
definite set of opinions which we can regard as a genuine confession
of faith. And this is a vital characteristic of skeptical minds of his
stamp, swiftly receptive, and as open as the day to each new
intellectual impulse as it arises. Thus we must attribute to his
capacity for mental development, as well as to the narrowness of his
philosophical range, the many contradictions which his writings
exhibit in such matters of intellectual belief as are wont to give a
permanent bias of thought to minds less volatile and alert. Are we to
regard him as an optimist or a pessimist? a believer in immortality or
devotee of annihilation? a fatalist or spiritualist in history? an
advocate of free will or determinism? We can not say, and M. Faguet
has amused himself with supporting each of these opinions in turn upon
its appropriate text, whose clearness is beyond dispute.
If there was one set of opinions to which Voltaire may be said to have
somewhat consistently adhered I may instance his vague and insipid
deism, which relegated to God the rôle of an absentee landlord in this
poor world which he created and governs by absolute law, but in whose
affairs he only intervenes when the death rent is to be collected. He
infers a creative God from the argument of the clockmaker and the
clock, but takes extreme pleasure in showing how sadly the poor
machine is out of order. His idea of the social utility of an avenging
and rewarding God must of course be regarded as a freak of
intellectual caprice, and yet his timid political instincts made him
regard the terrorizing influence of the doctrine of hell with some
complacency as a restraining force upon the unthinking masses. The
story is well known of the atheistic conversation between D'Alembert
and Condorcet at Voltaire's table, who summarily dismissed the
servants from the room with the remark: "Maintenant, messieurs, vous
pouvez continuer. Je craignais seulement d'être égorgé cette nuit."
The _Dictionnaire philosophique_ confirms the flippant utilitarian
point of view, which we must beware of regarding as a personal
conviction. "I insist particularly on the immortality of the soul,
because there is nothing to which I hold more than the idea of hell.
We have to do with a host of rogues who have never thought; a crowd of
petty people, brutes and drunkards and thieves. Preach to them if you
will that there is no hell and that the soul is mortal. As for me I
will cry in their ears that they are damned if they rob me." It is
needless to add that convictions of this eminently practical nature
did not seriously hamper Voltaire in his anti-religious crusade.
To every branch of letters Voltaire brought the same splendid
qualities of mind, and need I add the same defective qualities of
conscience and carelessness of the truth when his personal glory or
his material advancement were concerned? The sordid pages of his life
would weary us in the turning, yet his native generosity and sympathy
incline us to charity; and it is wonderful how his never-failing wit
can temper his vindictiveness for us, now that the sting has lost its
living poison.
I have referred to Professor Dowden's unsatisfactory treatment of the
international reactions which characterize the literary history of the
eighteenth century. There is another omission which I have remarked in
the book on a reperusal of the pages devoted to Rousseau and the
encyclopedists. It might have been easily within the scope of a
literary story of even moderate dimensions to have more explicitly
accounted for the crumbling of the old classical ideal, to have shown
that the once impregnable citadel of classical art was rotten at the
base, and that those who still defended the imaginary stronghold were
themselves the unconscious agents of its destruction. With reference
to the irreligious influences of Cartesianism and the philosophical
system of Bayle I shall say no more, save that the evident loss in
prestige of the traditional religious faith, combined as it was with
the rapid decentralization of the sovereign power in the state, must
perforce make impossible the survival of literature on the old
national basis. Again, in point of pure art a decline was inevitable
in connection with the revival of Cartesianism among writers of the
stamp of Fontenelle; for their prestige was synchronous with the
triumph of the modern party in the famous quarrel; and no student of
the _Art Poétique_ will fail to appreciate the æsthetical significance
of an abandonment of classical standards of taste as an unimpeachable
canon of art. Defending as Boileau did the supreme value of reason and
good sense, what justification could he have found for poetry unless
he had proved to the satisfaction of his generation that poetry better
than any other mode of expression could render permanent the
promptings of the diviner reason, as witness the eternal monuments of
ancient art in the domain of poetry? The triumph of the moderns then
turned men's faces in other directions, and whether literary art
should henceforward advance or decline, it must at least strike root
in a newer soil.
The inroads of sensibility into French literature, as exemplified in
Marivaux and Prévost in the thirties, followed swiftly by the rank and
file, also wrought havoc in the old classical method, though this fact
may not without further reflection be conceded. But in the broad realm
of psychological observation, where classic art had reigned supreme,
the influx of a certain morbid sensibility strangely warped the mental
vision of the observer. Diderot, a veritable sinner himself in this
respect, admits as much in an unguarded moment: "L'homme sensible est
trop abandonné à la merci de son diaphragme ... pour être un profond
observateur et conséquemment un sublime imitateur de la nature." Every
one knows Voltaire's naïve statement which bears condemnatory evidence
to the bluntness of his psychology. "La nature est partout la même."
And is it not, we ask, this enigmatical typical man, out of space and
out of time, for whom the chimerical theories of universal
perfectibility were soon to be woven?
It is incontestably true, then, that the character of human
observation undergoes a sensible alteration in the course of the
century, and that whereas the individual man had been heretofore
studied inasmuch as he was in himself of typical value, henceforward
not man the individual will be the object of study, but the
observation of human relations will usurp the field, and psychological
analysis will yield to social investigation.
I would add a word or two by way of conclusion to illustrate how the
encyclopedists in their propaganda, aided in part by the coincident
influence of Rousseau, established ideals of thought and conduct which
were in the most violent contrast to the ideals cherished in the
preceding century. Of course, we readily understand that the
encyclopedists threw to the four corners of heaven the outworn respect
of religious and political tradition. Furthermore, we may ask
ourselves what it is which in a sense makes Molière and La Fontaine
isolated in their century; and the answer will not be far to seek when
we realize that these two alone of all their fellows urged the
suspected authority of instinct as a sufficient guide for conduct. Yet
how far were not even these bolder spirits from the natural man of
Rousseau or of Diderot?
The views of the two centuries concerning the authority of reason seem
at first sight to coincide, yet, while bearing Boileau in mind, we can
confidently assert that the doctrine of the sovereignty of reason was
not established as a principle of thought until the culminating years
of the eighteenth century. Pascal's "taisez-vous raison imbécile"
indicates how attempered and attenuated by spiritual faith were the
dictates of pure reason in his day, and the reason of Boileau, as I
have already observed, was strongly tinged with æstheticism. I need
not, with reference to eighteenth-century reason worship, go further
than to refer the curious of enlightenment on the subject to the
masterly works of Morley on the period in question, in which it is
precisely this unflinching devotion to reason or unreason (if the sage
of Chelsea will have it thus) which stimulates his calm and logical
temperament to positive enthusiasm.
A last element of contrast between the centuries is of interest in
connection with the habitual mode of thought which Godwin and his
political disciple Shelley borrowed from eighteenth-century French
sources with reference to the true relations subsisting between laws
and morals. The seventeenth-century mind held tenaciously enough to
the theory that it is the _moeurs_ of a nation that inspire the laws,
but the encyclopedists were inspired in their undying hope of
amelioration and human progress to perfectibility by the contrary
theory that men, after all, are only bad because the laws have made
them so.
It may be conceded, then, that these broad relations of literary
movements one with the other, the conflict of converging tendencies,
and the more evident causes of the growth and decay of powerful
manifestations of a nation's thought, are of quite sufficient moment
to have merited fuller treatment at the hands of the eminent critic
who has in all other respects fulfilled his task so admirably, that
having regard to the necessary conditions of the subject, it would be
above criticism if anything could be.
THE BOTANY OF SHAKESPEARE.
BY THOMAS H. MACBRIDE.
The universality of Shakespeare is the common remark of critics. Other
great men have been versatile; Shakespeare alone is universal. He
alone of all great men seems to have been able to follow his own
advice, "to hold as it were the mirror up to Nature." On the clear
surface of his thought, as on a deep Alpine lake, the whole shore lies
reflected--not alone the clouds, the sky, the woods, the castles, the
rocks, the mountain path by which the shepherd strolls; not alone the
broad highway by which may march the king in splendor the peasant with
his wain; but even the humbler objects by the still water's edge, the
trodden grass, the fluttering sedge, the broken reed, the tiniest
flower, all things, all Nature in action or repose finds counterpart
within the glassy depths.
Hence it is that no man, at least no English-speaking man, reads
Shakespeare wrong. Everybody understands him. Here is a sort of
Anglo-Saxon Bible in which, so far as the world goes, every soul finds
himself, with all his hopes, his doubts, his whims, depicted. We are
therefore not surprised that everybody claims a share in Shakespeare;
rather claims the poet as his own. The Protestant is sure that
Shakespeare despised the hierarchy; the Romanist is quite as certain
that he loved the Church. There exists an essay to prove him a
Presbyterian; another to show that the great dramatist was a
Universalist. A volume has been written to prove the man a soldier;
another that he was a lawyer, a printer, a fisherman, a freemason; and
here are five or six articles to show that Shakespeare was a
gardener.[U]
[Footnote U: In preparation of this article the author has consulted
chiefly the following: John Gerarde, The Herball or General Historie
of Plants, 1597; Shakspere, Edward Dowden, 1872; William Shakespeare,
Works, Globe edition, 1867; Natural History of Shakespeare, Bessie
Mayou, 1877; Shakespeare's England, William Winter, 1894; The Plant
lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare, H. F. Ellacombe, 1896; The
Gardener's Chronicle, sundry pamphlets, and shorter articles.]
All this simply means that the poet had a marvelous faculty for close
observing; that his vision was accurate, his instinct wonderfully
true. It may be therefore worth our while to study for a little this
remarkable man from the standpoint of a naturalist, to see how he who
so vividly paints a passion can paint a flower; how the man who limns
a character, till beyond the photograph it starts to actuality, will
catch the essential feature of some natural truth.
We shall nowhere lack for material. The plays are full of references
to plants and flowers of every sort. England in Shakespeare's day, as
now, was a land of bloom, and the poet but reflects the loveliness of
beauty and color spread about him. But he does something more. He is
not content with flashes of color and breathings of odor, he goes into
detail and gives us the individual plant unmistakably. In his
description he shows an exactitude, a discriminating perception that,
had it been turned to Nature's problems seriously at all, must at once
have transformed the science of his age. But Shakespeare was not a man
of science; he was a poet. In his views of Nature he resembles the
great poets of the world, notably Goethe; and, like Goethe, he not
infrequently outruns the science of his time, uses his imagination,
divining things invisible. Moreover, Shakespeare's plants are living
things; they form a garden, not a herbarium. They stand before us in
multitudes, so that it is difficult for the present purpose to know
what to select. We must be content with a few specimen forms brought
out in quotations no more extensive than seems necessary to the
argument. Of course, there are many plants to-day discussed of which
Shakespeare never heard. He does not speak of many sorts of fungi, of
slime molds, microbes; he knew nothing about these. The microscope had
hardly been invented, and the unseen world was as yet largely
personified. And yet Shakespeare has not failed to note the visible
signs of some of our microscopic forms. Critics have wasted their time
and the patience of mankind in an effort to identify Hebona, the
"leperous distilment" poured into the porches of the royal ear. Almost
profitless are such discussions. Yet we may note that we have here to
do with an effect; the means of producing it need not be too closely
questioned. Before the rush of action, the weird setting, the voice of
an apparition, the excited audience cares not what the mysterious vial
may contain--ebony, henbane, yew, or whether it were entirely empty.
What is called for is a speedy and mysterious taking off. Had the
scene been laid in Italy, the effect had been reached by the fateful
prick of a jeweled pin, some ring upon a Borgian finger whose pressure
was the paralysis of death. But the king died of no such curari. Note
the symptoms (Hamlet, i, 5, 64-73):
"The leperous distilment; whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,
And with a sudden vigour it doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine;
And a most instant tetter barked about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust,
All my smooth body."
These are the symptoms of blood-poisoning, vividly portrayed; of some
contagion, communicable by infection. In foul old London Shakespeare
had doubtless seen endemic, zymotic diseases of every description, and
drew his picture from the life. Royal blood is notoriously unsound,
royal habit leaves the porches of royal ears especially exposed. On
our supposition the vial need not have contained very much, not even
ebony. The dramatist had plenty of mystery ready to his hand, and the
Hebona is perhaps intentionally ambiguous. Bacterial diseases were of
old called plagues; they fell from heaven. Listen to King Lear:
"Now, all the plagues that in the pendulous air
Hang fated o'er men's faults, light on my daughters!"
Or Caliban:
"All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him
By inch-meal a disease!"
Or they were attributed, as already intimated, to unseen personal
agencies:
"This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and
walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints
the eye, and makes the hare-lip; mildews the white wheat, and
hurts the poor creature of earth."
I quote this latter rather also to show the accuracy and compass of
Shakespeare's vision. How many people, not farmers, have seen wheat
whitened by the blight! And that is exactly the description, white not
"to the harvest," but whiter still to sterility and death.
But leaving aside all microscopic forms which may or may not be
incidentally touched upon everywhere, we may turn our attention next
to cryptogamic plants which are positively defined. The sudden
springing of mushrooms, for instance, especially at night, so unreal
and yet realities withal, made their creation a suitable trick for
Prospero:
"You demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew."
The "green sour ringlets on the fields whereof the ewe not bites" are
"fairy rings." The same thing appears in the speech of Dame Quickly:
"And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing,
Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring;
The expressure that it bears, green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see."
Fungi, toadstools, mushrooms, and so forth, are fructifications only;
the vegetative part of the plants permeates the soil, feeds on its
organic matter, and spreads almost equally, we may assume, in all
directions from the point of starting. When now this vegetative growth
has accumulated energy to form fruit, the sporocarps or mushrooms rise
all around at the limits of activity; hence, in a circle.
The fungi cut a small figure in Shakespeare--i. e., considering their
numbers and almost omnipresence. But we must remember that they were
at that time studied by few, their significance and interest little
suspected. They formed part of the realm of the world unseen; they
came and went at the instance of powers unknown, mostly personified,
imaginary, a misty population, the thought of which kept for long ages
the childhood of our race in terror. Shakespeare saw the forms of
unstudied plants, everything visible to the naked eye, and really
omitted very little. He speaks of mosses--the lichens were included
with them--chiefly as indicative of age in the object in which they
rest:
"Under an oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity."
Then again he simply touches them, but in such a way as to reveal his
full appreciation of their beauty, as in Cymbeline, iv, 2. For the
decoration of Imogen's grave the ruddock would bring flowers--
"... bring thee all this;
Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,
To winter-ground thy corse."
The "furred moss" to "winter-ground thy corse" is exquisite.
Ferns, though so much larger, so handsome, and in our day so
all-attractive, failed generally to impress our fathers.
Butler, writing in 1670, has this to say:
"They spring like fern, that infant weed,
Equivocally without a seed,
And have no possible foundation
But merely in th' imagination."
Now, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, ferns answered his purpose
without seed just as well as with such visible means of perpetuity.
His only reference is I Henry, iv, where Gadshill says:
"We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible";
and Chamberlain replies:
"Nay, by my faith, I think you are more belonging to the
Night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible."
In this connection Ellacombe suggests the doctrine of signatures. The
God of Nature had written for us his human children prescriptions all
over the leafy world. The remedy indicated by its form its own
application. Thus a heart-shaped leaf was good medicine for cardiac
troubles, a lung-like leaf was good for consumption, a lungwort in
fact, and so a liverwort, a spleenwort, and the like. Gerarde, and, in
fact, all the old medical writers throughout the centuries, are full
of this. Now, what more natural than that a plant which could thus
perpetuate itself age after age by means invisible should be able to
confer the much-sought gift of invisibility, the power to disappear
and reappear at pleasure? Many people so believed. Shakespeare appears
to have been skeptical.
Turn we now to the flowering plants: the amount of material at our
disposal, as already indicated, is immense. Shakespeare was evidently
a great lover of flowers simply as such. His pages from first to last
are ornate with color, almost redolent of roses, lilies, eglantine,
with every conceivable metaphor and trope--"the bud of love," the
"nettle of danger," the "flower of safety." Their lovely shapes are
ever before him; he is spellbound with their beauty. "England itself
is a sea-walled garden." Grammatical forms may vanish, if only the
flower may live. Compare Cymbeline, ii, 3:
"Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that _lies_."
The image of the morning flowers, the fiery steeds that drink them
dry, shall fascinate us so that we forget the grammar. It will not do
to say lie; the word must rhyme with "arise," and further on with
"eyes":
"And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes:
With everything that pretty is,
My lady sweet arise."
For the Queen of the Fairies he spreads this sort of a couch:
"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight," etc.
Such cases reveal the impress, the healthy, happy impress which Nature
could exercise on this the foremost man of all the world, the harmony
between Nature and Nature's child. All the plants in the last
quotation are wild flowers, except the musk-roses, and these are so
common in England as to be almost wild. The eglantine was the
sweetbrier, said to be wild in all the southern part of the island and
popular in the literature of all recorded centuries. Gerarde describes
as follows: "The leaves are glittering, of beautiful green color, of
smell most pleasant.... The fruit when it is ripe maketh most pleasant
meats, and banqueting dishes, as tarts and such like, the making
whereof I commit to the cunning cook, and teeth to eat them in the
rich man's mouth."
The sweetness of the leaf of the eglantine is referred to by
Shakespeare in another passage which I venture to quote now for
another purpose, to show the accuracy of his description as applied to
simple flowers. The lines are from the scene quoted before. Arviragus
and Guiderius would bury the swooning Imogen. They think her dead
(Cymbeline, iv, 2):
"I'll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack
The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweetened not thy breath."
Primroses when pale are the palest of all withering plants. The
flowers change color with maturity, especially after fertilization.
The paleness of the primrose is the pallor of decay. But the azure
harebell--behold it waving on its slender stipe beneath the shade of
some great rock--who can look into its delicate cerulean cup again and
not bethink him of the blue-veined eyelid sleep that falls upon our
human flowers!
The same accuracy of detail is evinced in many other places. Take, for
instance, Shakespeare's description of the violet all the way through.
It moves him chiefly by its odor (King John, iv, 2):
"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, to add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess."
Nevertheless, we have violets dim, and violets blue, and purple
violets, and more particularly "blue-veined" violets, as if the poet
looked with a lens into the very throat of the flower which Frenchmen
call a thought. "And there is pansies--that's for thoughts." His
description of the elm is equally exact (Midsummer-Night's Dream, iv,
1, 47-49):
"So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm."